When Jean Baudrillard published his classic text, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in 1995, it still seemed like a relatively novel idea. Common-sense notions of war such as friend and enemy were still current and reportage was confined to large media corporations. (more…)
Tag: Christopher Pankhurst
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Czech version here
It’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the contemporary Left is spectacularly alienating its own natural constituency with its increasingly unfocused and incoherent forms of protest. Certainly, they are vocal in denouncing Trump as a fascist, and Brexit as some sort of ur-nationalism, (more…)
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Brett Stevens
Nihilism: A Philosophy Based in Nothingness and Eternity
Colac, Australia: Manticore Press, 2016The title of Brett Stevens’ new book, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based in Nothingness and Eternity, inclined me to think that this work would be in the same vein as other works of pessimist philosophy such as Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, or Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy. (more…)
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Guillaume Faye
Archeofuturism 2.0
London: Arktos, 2016Guillaume Faye’s new novel begins in the last few days before the outbreak of the First World War. A fashionable and rather aristocratic group of young people (nowadays we would call them “privileged”) consult a clairvoyant who gives an astonishingly accurate series of descriptions of increasingly distant futures. (more…)
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September 27, 2016 Christopher Pankhurst
Albion’s Hidden Numina
Under the SkinThe 2000 novel Under the Skin by Michel Faber tells the story of a female alien called Isserley. We meet her living on a remote Scottish farm from where she takes regular road trips looking for single men. The purpose of these trips transpires to be predatory; she is hunting humans to farm for her fellow alien beings.
Michel Faber has an interesting background. According to Wikipedia: (more…)
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Joy Division left us with the most relentlessly depressing body of songs since Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In some ways, though, this singularity of approach, this lack of light touches to add color to the palate, is responsible for making them enduringly fascinating. (more…)
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Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) begins with the evocation of fear which becomes the motivational impulse for Bruce Wayne’s story. As a child he accidentally falls down a disused well, and, whilst he lies trapped and injured, he is terrified by a flock of bats that appear like a chthonic force of nature from the bowels of the earth. (more…)
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1,075 words
Samuel Crowell
William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2016The idea that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare is a well-established motif in literary conspiracy theories. Starting in the mid-19th century, numerous and varied writers have gone into great detail to prove that the Shakespeare corpus was actually written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, amongst others. (more…)
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604 words
English original here
Ohledně vraždy poslankyně Jo Coxové zjevně panuje politický konsenzus. Zasedání obou komor parlamentu byla odvolána, aby všichni zástupci lidu mohli náležitě projevit svou soustrast. Mimoto už všechny ostatní velké politické strany oznámily, že se v doplňovacích volbách nebudou ucházet o její uprázdněné křeslo. (more…)
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794 words
Czech translation here
There seems to be a political consensus surrounding the murder of Jo Cox MP. The House of Commons and the House of Lords are to be recalled so that everyone will be able to pay tribute to her. Additionally, the other main political parties have announced that they will not be contesting the resulting by election that will take place as a result of her death. (more…)
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2,046 words
Francis Bacon was an extraordinary and extreme artist and one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. He was also a Right-wing elitist and individualist who approached the problem of creating art in the twentieth century with an honesty and intensity that have not really been matched. Generally speaking, it is probably true to say that most of the Right dismiss Bacon along with other contemporary artists mainly because of his unique treatment of the human form. But in my view his art enunciates a violent assault on the complacency of conventional thinking and perception that should be seen as deeply consonant with the project of the Alt Right. (more…)
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3,789 words
If you think of the Pre-Raphaelites you will probably be put in mind of flame-haired women in medieval dress or perhaps the depiction of a scene from a biblical or mythological story. The aesthetic appeal of such paintings seems to derive from a pre-modernist craving for something formally beautiful in its own right, without any sense of remove or cynicism. And if you consider that the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement preceded the emergence of Dada by only a few years then it really does seem as though the Brotherhood marked a final statement in the history of Western art. (more…)
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Oswald Spengler’s radical contribution to the philosophy of history was to observe that different Cultures and Civilizations are discrete life forms and that they all have a certain life-expectancy. The linear progression of history, from the Stone Age to the prevailing Western liberalism, is a myth. There is no single line of history running through all of humanity. Instead, Cultures are born, they grow to maturity, they age, and they die. (more…)